It’s simple: bad.

im not an expert at criticism, but I think its fair from their part.

I mean, can you remind me what are the hardware requirements to run deepseek locally?
oh, you need a high-end graphics card with at least 8 GB VRAM for that*? for the highly distilled variants! for more complete ones you need multiple such graphics card interconnected! how do you even do that with more than 2 cards on a consumer motherboard??

how many do you think have access to such a system, I mean even 1 high-end gpu with just 8 GB VRAM, considering that more and more people only have a smartphone nowadays, but also that these are very expensive even for gamers?
and as you will read in the 2nd referenced article below, memory size is not the only factor: the distill requiring only 1 GB VRAM still requires a high-end gpu for the model to be usable.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/amd-released-instructions-for-running-deepseek-on-ryzen-ai-cpus-and-radeon-gpus

https://bizon-tech.com/blog/how-to-run-deepseek-r1-locally-a-free-alternative-to-openais-o1-model-hardware-requirements#a6

https://codingmall.com/knowledge-base/25-global/240733-what-are-the-system-requirements-for-running-deepseek-models-locally

so my point is that when talking about deepseek, you can't ignore how they operate their online service, as most people will only be able to try that.

I understand that recently it's very trendy, and cool to shit on Proton, but they have a very strong point here.

It might be that they're equating the name with the app and company, not the open source model, based on one of the first lines:

AI chat apps like ChatGPT collect user data, filter responses, and make content moderation decisions that are not always transparent.

Emphasis mine. The rest of the article reads the same way.

Most people aren't privacy-conscious enough to care who gets what data and who's building the binaries and web apps, so sounding the alarm is appropriate for people who barely know the difference between AI and AGI.

I get that people are mad at Proton right now (anyone have a link? I'm behind on the recent stuff), but we should ensure we get mad at things that are real, not invent imaginary ones based on contrived contexts.

There are many llms you can use offline

DeepSeek is open source, meaning you can modify code(new window) on your own app to create an independent — and more secure — version. This has led some to hope that a more privacy-friendly version of DeepSeek could be developed. However, using DeepSeek in its current form — as it exists today, hosted in China — comes with serious risks for anyone concerned about their most sensitive, private information.

Any model trained or operated on DeepSeek’s servers is still subject to Chinese data laws, meaning that the Chinese government can demand access at any time.

What???? Whoever wrote this sounds like he has 0 understanding of how it works. There is no "more privacy-friendly version" that could be developed, the models are already out and you can run the entire model 100% locally. That's as privacy-friendly as it gets.

"Any model trained or operated on DeepSeek's servers are still subject to Chinese data laws"

Operated, yes. Trained, no. The model is MIT licensed, China has nothing on you when you run it yourself. I expect better from a company whose whole business is on privacy.

To be fair its correct but it's poor writing to skip the self hosted component. These articles target the company not the model.

Pretty rich coming from Proton, who shoved a LLM into their mail client mere months ago.